Shaina

“Is there any more feudal, soul eradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking but it is not enjoyable & surely not ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self & humanity.”
― Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

“author Véronique Vienne recalled how she had to work hard to adapt to the mandated cheerfulness of American culture when she moved from France to the States; she practiced her smile in the mirror, trying her best to look like “Miss Congenial ity,” before concluding that “in this country, the obligation we feel to conform to exalted standards of happiness can be pure misery.”
― Debra Ollivier, What French Women Know What French Women Know Of Love, Sex and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind

“Alexis de Tocqueville took one good hard look at America’s growing colonies and noted: “America is the one country in the world where the most continual care has been taken to trace clearly separated lines of action for the two sexes, and where the wish is for them to walk with equal steps, but always on different paths.”
― Debra Ollivier, What French Women Know What French Women Know Of Love, Sex and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind

“…there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall.”
― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education